Pocophone F1: It has a problem

The Pocophone F1 is no dought an amazing deal. Therefore if you haven’t read our review yet then you can read it here. Now, we have stumbled upon a problem that might bug some people. So what is it?

We can understand that to make a device like Pocophone F1 and pricing it at only $300 is a rough job. You must do cost cutting here and there to make it possible. Now it’s it’s been discovered that the device lacks support for Widevine L1. That resulted in it not being able to play HD content on Netflix.

“It can’t play HD content on Netflix“

What is Widevine L1?

Widevine is a DRM module which is popularly used by many apps. Also, there are multiple levels of support for Widevine, with L1 being full support. The Pocophone F1 only has Widevine L3 support. Therefore the Pocophone F1 is slightly limited in streaming content from subscription-based websites. Still, You can stream content at 540p.

By the way, you can stream content on Youtube at 1080p without any problems.

This is not a software issue and it can’t be fixed with software updates. In order to fix this issue, Xiaomi has to physically modify the phone.

For some people, this might be a deal breaker. I can understand that clearly. If you have the bandwidth and data capacity then you would definitely want to stream your content at the highest quality available. Though I must say 540p content on a six-inch device doesn’t look bad at all. Also, for some users, 540p might be far more reasonable than full HD. You will save a lot of battery power and data by doing that.

So, is it a deal breaker?

Well, obviously not. At this price range, the Pocophone F1 is still the best. If you are someone who watches Netflix and Amazon Prime on a daily basis, this might be a deal breaker for you. But for me, it is still a great deal.